Something Wicked This Way Comes
by SelDeLaTerre
Summary: Gold leaves Storybrooke to find Baelfire. A hopeless search is revived when an old friend turns up with a crystal ball that can locate anyone in the world. The Wicked Witch of the West offers the dealer a deal- she'll help him find his son if he goes with her to Kansas to exact revenge on Dorothy Gale. NOT ROMANCE. Ozfic, but not really crossover.
1. Prologue

_I don't own OUAT at all. I just had an idea for a story after reading an interview with the showrunners who said that all the lands and characters of Oz were not off limits for future seasons. This is how I would write in my favorite denizen of Oz- The Wicked Witch of the West. But before we learn how Miss Elphaba (using the Wicked universe name for her because I like it, not because it's a crossover) knows our dear Rumple, before we find out how she ended up in a land without magic, before we even get Gold out into the world beyond Storybrooke, we must begin at the very beginning..._

Mary Margaret was rooting through her jewelry box at gunpoint. Her fingers slipped over thin silver bracelets, smooth opal stones set into cheap settings- the rings were somewhere at the bottom of the heap. This had to be, she thought in the moments where she wasn't concentrating on her collection, the calmest robbery in the history of Storybrooke. Gold had the barrel of his gun pressed politely into a part of her back where a shot would cause damage but not death, and his gloved hand on her shoulder was there for purely directorial purposes. It appeared that he did not intend to hurt her at all.

"All the trouble your prince went through to get you that ring, dearie, I thought you'd be wearing it," Gold said dully as he waited for her to find what he had come to steal.

"Took it off for cleaning," she lied, and found it in the bottom of the box. The green peridot stone was of inferior quality and the silver was scratched nearly white, but Mary Margaret knew that all of the jewels in this world or the next could not have been more valuable. She held it out to Gold, who had to pocket his gun to reach out and accept it with his free hand. Once he had the ring, he touched it gently to his cheek and closed his eyes for a moment. A thousand possibilities rushed through Mary Margaret's head- this could have been the perfect moment to rush him, kick his cane out from under him and run out of the apartment, knock him on the head with a lamp and vault out the window onto the fire escape- anything that would let her keep her ring and incapacitate the vile wizard who was invading her home. She reached behind her for the lamp on the nightstand where her jewelry box was and was prepared to crash it down on the pawnbroker's head when he opened his eyes again.

He really did have the blandest, strangest eyes. Snow White remembered how they were supposed to be. A nasty bright amber that took up more than half the given space. Pinpricks for pupils, a deadly glee always lurking behind them. She had hated those eyes and feared them when he turned his evil gaze upon her. In Storybrooke, Rumplestiltskin's eyes were pure black, two ink blots dropped in the yellowing white of an aging man's eyes. And they were sad. Sad and desperate.

Mary Margaret remembered what the ring was meant to be used for. True love would always follow that ring, regardless of who was wearing it. And even if she couldn't believe that true love was even a part of Mr. Gold's emotional vocabulary, she moved her hand away from the lamp. He needed this ring to find someone, someone he at least thought he loved, and simply didn't know how to ask.

Gold slipped the ring into his pocket and crossed the kitchen in a few limping strides. He had almost reached the door when-

"Wait!" Mary Margaret called out to him and Gold turned around. His hand was already in his pocket again, no doubt closing around the mechanism of his revolver. For a man who so loved to hear the sound of his own voice, he was oddly silent.

"I'll make you a deal. I won't tell anyone about this…if you bring it back after you find her."

Gold had the audacity to look confused, if only for a split second. Then, he smiled the way he did when he was about to say something clever. It only seemed to affect half of his face. He lifted his cane and pointed it directly at Mary Margaret- no, at something right behind Mary Margaret. She turned to see that it was Henry's school picture, framed and set on her nightstand.

"That boy is the truest source of love you will ever know in your short life, Princess," he said, and continued out the door. Before he closed it and limped down the hallway, Mary Margaret could have sworn she heard him say-

"Deal."


	2. Chapter 1

The serving staff at the Palm Court in the Plaza Hotel called him The Dark One out of a misguided attempt at making light of the fact that the hotel's newest long term tenant frightened them. He came down for tea at exactly the same time each day and ordered a h pot of Russian Gunpowder tea with lemon, never sugar. Any server who got him in their section had to resign herself to losing a table for the rest of the afternoon, as he stayed for the entire two hours of tea service and left only when the tables were cleared to start setup for dinner.

It wasn't that he was a nuisance. There were more than enough tables to turn over for other guests and he tipped extravagantly for a Brit, it was just that he made some of the servers feel uncomfortable. It wasn't rare to go about busing a table on the other side of the ballroom and look up to find his perfectly black, beady eyes fixed on you searchingly. He also had a habit of calling whoever served him "dearie" in an offhand way that was too familiar, as if he knew your secrets. The halting way he walked with his hawkshead cane, the way his greying hair was longer than most American men of his age would dare grow it, the way his dark gold tooth glittered expensively in his mouth- it was just off putting. Elegant, foreign, handsome, and altogether nasty. He was no one's favorite customer.

- - -

Sherriff Swan gave him the idea to use the ring. She broke the curse over Storybrooke with true love's kiss, but it was the kind of truelove a mother felt for her son. Magic recognized all kinds of love, and once he brought his powers back to this realm, Rumplestiltskin realized that the green peridot ring he had given Prince James would likely function as his best hope for finding Baelfire.

He had been living at the Plaza for a month before he got his first lead. It was primarily his own fault. The enchantment he set on the ring was vague, messy; it glowed when one was in closer proximity to the bearer's true love, but had no way of distinguishing where that true love was in a city where one was surrounded by thousands of people at any given time. He had driven south from Storybrooke, crossed rivers and state lines and bridges, only to find that the ring glowed brightest when he oriented himself towards a big black dot on the map: New York. Bae had to be here somewhere on this 34-square-mile, eight-million-person dead end of an island. He had to be.

Each day after he took his tea in the Palm Court of the grand hotel Mr. Gold now called home, he was in the habit of leaving a despicably large tip on the table and leaving to start the day's search. He preferred to look in the afternoons because New Yorkers were more mobile then. The odds of catching Bae on the street were higher as opposed to hoping that the ring could detect a true love hovering somewhere nineteen stories up or hurtling through the subways below. Mr. Gold's driver was a nice enough fellow named Charlie who likely would have thought he was insane if Gold had allowed him to keep his memory at the end of each day. What other explanation would there be for a paying customer who hired him to show up at the Plaza and drive in circles around midtown Manhattan every evening?

From behind the anonymous tinted glass of Charlie's town car, Mr. Gold held the small silver ring between two fingers and stared out at the busy streets of New York. Once or twice the ring flashed brighter and Gold had leaped out of the vehicle excitedly, but the crush of New York's crowds had beaten him back and he couldn't identify which of the faceless horde was his own son. This upset him. The last time it had happened he had gone back to his hotel early and smashed every bottle in his suite's minibar, which didn't make him feel better and cost him what amounted to an entire day's worth of spinning. He was at the front desk of the Plaza settling the account for that one when he got his lead.

"Here is your receipt, Mr. Gold," said the receptionist warily. The odd legend of the strange Scotsman who took forever to drink his tea was spreading around the hotel and many of the rest of the staff agreed that he was an uncomfortable man to be around. "There's one more thing. Someone came in to leave a message for you at the front desk."

That interested him. "Was it a man or a woman?" Gold asked.

"A young man. He didn't give his name but said to give this to you-" and she handed him a folded note written on the front desk's stationary. It was a very short note.

_Noon Saturday Belvedere Castle._


End file.
